Feb. 14, 2013

Written by

Kirk Moore

@KirkMooreAPP

Sandy was the deadliest mid-Atlantic hurricane since Agnes swept up Chesapeake Bay in 1972, according to a new report issued this morning by the National Hurricane Center.

The report underscores what hurricane experts always warn: the deadliest part of a storm is its surge, the sudden rush of water from the sea. During Sandy, the coastal floods claimed 41 of the 72 lives directly lost to the storm, many of them around New York Harbor, where the surge was 9 feet deep in some neighborhoods, the report says.

The Raritan Bay shore and Monmouth and Ocean counties took the brunt of what hurricane center analysts called unprecedented damage, with 22,000 homes uninhabitable in the days after the storm. In all, 650,000 homes were affected by Sandy, they wrote.

The report predicts that Sandy will prove to be the second-costliest tropical storm system in modern times, behind Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 impact on the gulf states. After adjustment for economic factors over time, it could rank sixth costliest in U.S. history.

The surge was between 11 and 111/2 feet above sea level at the Battery in lower Manhattan and measured at nearly 13 feet at Kings Point, near the eastern link between the upper harbor and Long Island Sound. The tide height at Sandy Hook is unknown, because the tide gauge there stopped working, but a high water mark of 8.9 feet above ground was found at the Coast Guard station, the report says.

A peak flood height of 7.9 feet above ground was found at Keyport, where the surge funneled up Raritan Bay to its deepest. Surge heights over ground were 4 to 5 feet along Barnegat Bay and 2 to 4 feet in Atlantic and Cape May counties, the report says.

Sandy lost its hurricane character at 5 p.m. Oct. 29, as it approached New Jersey and began pulling in cooler air to become what meteorologists call an extratropical cyclone.

The storm center, as calculated from radar records, came ashore near Brigantine, farther north than in early reports that had Sandy making landfall south of Atlantic City.